For the Love of a House

Brideshead Revisited is a love story. About a house.

This is one of those movies that you watch and feel like you really need to read the book when it's over. The whole thing feels like something is missing...like the middle, or details or something really, really important. And without that thing that's missing, you can't understand why anyone would read the book, much less watch the movie.

Here's the basic plot: Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is a man of limited means who goes to Oxford to read History, but his real passion in life is to become a painter. At Oxford he meets Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), and they become friends...the kind of friends that make out. Sebastian is deeply in love with Charles, although Charles appears to be kind of indifferent (thanks to Matthew Goode's inability to demonstrate any kind of emotion or present any facial expressions), so Sebastian takes him to meet the most important person in his life: an old woman who, although they never come out and say it and we never see the woman again, appears to have been his nanny.

But, when they get to Sebastian's house, the great mansion Brideshead, Charles falls in love with the house (I think--still no emotions or facial expressions). Sebastian, however, is in a great hurry to Charles out of the house, but is not quite quick enough and, as they are driving away they see Sebastian's overbearing mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) and his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). When the men go to their separate homes for the summer vacation, Sebastian misses Charles so much that he pretends a tiny injury is life-threatening so Charles will come and spend the summer with him.

But, it all goes awry. While Charles is visiting the Flytes at Brideshead, their father calls them to Rome to visit with him and his mistress, so Charles, Sebastian and Julia go, and Charles finally acts on his growing love for Julia (without, of course, showing any emotion or changing his facial expression). Sebastian sees this and is heartbroken, and begins a self-destructive spiral into severe alcoholism. Julia, however, pushes Charles away...their love can never be because Charles is an Atheist and Julia can only be married to a Roman Catholic.

And then there's some more movie after that...half of the movie, actually, but it lacks the narrative coherence of the first half of the film, so I'm not entirely sure what's happening or why or how we came to that place and then it randomly ends during the second world war.

The movie, I guess, is really about sickness within a family, and the way an overbearing mother, a strict religion, and an absent father can destroy children. Julia and Sebastian both feel trapped within their family and their faith (especially Sebastian, who's gay). Sebastian manages to escape through his escalating alcoholism, by drinking himself into disease in Morocco and being unable to travel back to England. Julia, however, finds herself in an unhappy marriage living at Brideshead, and, even when Charles offers to abandon his own marriage and run away with her, she just can't leave, partly because she knows that Charles loves Brideshead and the lifestyle he imagines it represents more than he really loves her.

The movie isn't really bad, per se, just really dull and lifeless. And Charles, whose perspective the film is shown from, just doesn't have any emotional depth, so it's almost impossible to identify with anyone or feel anything while you watch the film. In fact, I kept losing interest and it took me 3 days just to get through it. And I should love a film where one of the characters is so fabulous he describes himself not at an alcoholic homo but as a dipsomaniacal sodomite.

Blah.